Today is Mom’s birthday. She was born 94 years ago, giving her mom bragging rights to winning the great competition. During her teens, Mom penned this poem. Writing in first person as an octogenarian, the lovely green-eyed redhead tried to imagine what life would be like so many years in the future: Passing Phase of an Octogenarian Today is my birthday. And when they think I do not hearThey whisper I am old. They say that I have had my…
Now that we have a sunroom, Farmer Gary and I notice daily we have several new patches of disturbed earth outside. It’s time to decide what to plant there. We brought up the topic while visiting with John, Aubrie, and Cameron last week. Aubrie loves to garden and is always great with gentle advice – be it regarding fruit, vegetables, or flowers. It’s always fun for John and me to observe our spouses dig in and discuss fertilizer, alkaline levels…
Farmer Gary loves to read the newspaper. Always has. In fact, he’s declared Wednesday to be Newspaper Day each week, as that’s the day most of the weekly papers arrive in the mail. Each Wednesday, Gary dashes out to check the mailbox, then takes over our breakfast bar with his stack and works his way through the periodicals. Sadly, many of the dailies and almost-dailies he grew up reading are no longer … well, appealing. … but there are still…
Psst! Paula! Come here for a second, will ya? I was new to this job back in 1992 and still not over the fact that Santa Claus was a co-worker. As I stepped toward him, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Oh, boy!” I thought. “Santa secrets!” Not exactly. The jolly man in the white beard had a serious concern. Step a little closer, but don’t let anyone see what you’re doing. And tell me … do I stink?…
Middle-son John recently texted me this snippet he took in one of those bouncy-climby-noisy places kids love: Grandson Cameron was having a ball, playing with new friends and, it seems, climbing. I asked Cam a week or so later what he thought of that challenge. “Well, Goose …” (he calls me Goose) “I discovered I still have acrophobia.” John says the discovery was made when Cameron was about three stories up, so that seems to me more like a healthy…
Two years ago, as Gary and I finished clearing out Mom and Dad’s house in Connecticut, we set aside all kinds of mementos from their lives that we hoped would fit in the U-Box containers we’d rented. One entire section of the garage was filled with gardening tools. Some I remembered clearly from 50-something years prior. Dad loved to garden. It relaxed him after a long day in the office. A hoe, a rake, or a trowel was a piece…
“Oh, boy! Stinky cheese!” Dad sure knew how to clear a room. He was crazy about pungent cheese and all the drama his eating it entailed. Maybe it was the Frenchy-Frenchman side of him? We kids would run for cover while he all but inhaled chunks of Camembert, Munster, and Feta. Phew! As a child, I remember begging Mom to let me wait for her outside of a food shop in Pittsfield, a store that specialized (or so it seemed)…
Since retirement three years ago, it’s been fun to dabble in genealogy on Ancestry.com. Our family tree, at this point, looks much wider than tall. Geez, there were some huge families just a few generations back! The DNA tests that Farmer Gary and I took some years ago involved spitting into small tubes and mailing them off to Ancestry. My saliva was bubbly while Gary’s was flat. (I still wonder what that means.) Every so often, Ancestry emails with the…
Mom absolutely loved being a grandma. Over the years, she and Dad were blessed with seven grandchildren. Many summers ago, they enjoyed hosting five of those little varmints while vacationing in Ogunquit, Maine. (James and Lucy weren’t born yet.) Here’s a story Mom wrote 30 years ago, remembering that special time. Half a Hot Dog with Johnny It is October and three of our grandchildren are in school and thriving. I think of last August and the various times the…
I didn’t sleep last night. Not a wink. Not sure why, other than one of the challenges (and great pleasures) of retirement is not having a schedule set by anyone but yourself. James is back at college, so there wasn’t a school-aged son to stand at the darkened window and ask repeatedly, “Do you think we’ll get a snow day tomorrow? Just in case – can I stay up late?” It was always such a temptation to let the boys…